


Convergence

by dragonlover



Category: Halo (Video Games) & Related Fandoms
Genre: Gen, I travel to the Haloverse, Mary Sue, Self-Insert
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2009-04-11
Updated: 2009-04-11
Packaged: 2021-03-15 20:14:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,273
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29813805
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dragonlover/pseuds/dragonlover
Summary: A Slipspace anomaly sends me, a huge Halo geek, into the Haloverse, mere days before the invasion of Earth will begin.





	1. Chapter 1

**EARTH, SOL SYSTEM, OCTOBER, 2009 (UNKNOWN DATE)**

Rylee seethed as she stumbled around the map, searching for opportune targets. Her Elite character may have looked cool with its authentic Zealot-style armor colorations, but it made for poor camouflage and forced her to creep about the perimeter. At least that’s what she told herself, though she suspected her lack of “skillz” was probably a higher contributor to her lack of multiplayer success.

“Dai~!” she cried, Grunt-style, as a clever camper with Spartan armor killed her from behind. “Gah~!”

Her Elite body lay dead on the floor. As she watched, the Spartan player started to walk on it, choosing from Rylee’s dropped weapons.

“Oh, don’t you frakin’ corpse hump me,” she warned the screen, glaring at the Spartan. Then the screen started to warp and glow blue as the electricity failed, throwing the room into darkness. “What the frak?”

Then the world faded away.

**UNITED NATIONS SPACE COMMAND HOMEWORLD EARTH, SOL SYSTEM, OCTOBER, 2552 (MILITARY CALENDAR)**

“My head…” Rylee groaned as she blinked her eyes. She had felt something like motion-sickness, only it was more of an intense disorientation. The kind where she wasn’t sure where the local point of gravity was supposed to be.

Then her eyes focused.

_What the? Where am I?_ she thought, staring at her surroundings. She sat on the sidewalk of what appeared to be a city block, only the city was… weird looking. For one thing, the buildings, though they looked old, appeared to be made out of some plastic-looking material like you might see on that technology show _Beyond Tomorrow_ or something. For another thing, there were no lights on despite it being twilight hours.

This, however, seemed to be a common subject of confusion. Rylee overheard several people on the street remarking about the sudden blackout.

“You only rarely hear it so _quiet_ ,” one of the people marveled, his words accented rather oddly. Rylee couldn’t place the region of origin.

Out of the blue, power returned. The city at once lit up with brilliant light that blocked the stars from view. Various sounds of machinery, from traffic to trains, to other things Rylee couldn’t identify began to fill the air. She realized that yes; it was very quiet compared to what the city sounded like normally.

“ _Oni_ ’s testing their nasty tricks,” it sounded like the pedestrian said.

Rylee assumed he was referencing the _oni_ monster of Japanese myth, though he didn’t look like the manga-geek type.

…Although, Rylee wasn’t sure she could tell exactly what “type” the person was supposed to be. His clothes didn’t resemble any fashion she knew about, and he wore strange earrings that seemed to change color depending on the angle one looked at them.

She decided to approach him.

“Excuse me?” she said, stepping over to the guy. “I’m kind of lost. I was wondering if you could tell me what city this is?”

“Hey, check out the authentic Y2K threadware!” the guy chuckled as he looked over her outfit. “This is Seattle, o’ course. What’d you do, drain an alc-bev dispenser?”

Rylee could barely follow the slang, but she got the gist of it. “I’m not drunk, just a bit… disoriented… Um, Seattle, huh?”

She glanced at the nearby buildings, none of which looked remotely familiar. “When did they put up this neighborhood?”

“Dunno,” the guy said with a shrug. “2530s, 2520s…”

Rylee’s eyes narrowed. She had absolutely no idea what to make of someone saying she’d been dumped 500 years into the future. What was this, Talk Like a Future-Citizen Day or something?

“It was before the Insurrection,” offered a female teenager standing nearby, who was dressed in similar strange garb. Like the less than friendly guy, she possessed the same unfamiliar accent. “I know my grandmother moved here before anyone really cared about Reach as anything other than a glorified military base, but now…”

Her face darkened. “Now all anyone talks about is the fall of Reach and the Covenant threat. How they only have ten and half light years to travel to find Earth…”

Rylee just stared, trying to process her words. What sounded at first like random nonsense was starting to sound very familiar. She was a _Halo_ geek, after all. Heck, she helped manage the Halopedia! Which made her wonder just what happened with his game earlier. All she remembered was getting owned and then…

“Hey, are you a refue?” the girl asked suddenly.

“What?” she asked, startled. She knew the term, sure – a somewhat derogatory reference to a refugee emigrated to Earth from a colony world in an attempt to flee the approaching Covenant. However, it was a rather obscure word, used only in the _ilovebees_ campaign and not something she’d expect the average _Halo_ fan to know, much less use.

“Oh, I mean _refugee_. Sorry,” the girl apologized, apparently misunderstanding Rylee’s reaction. “It’s just your outfit seems kinda… low-grade. Your necklace looks like it’s gonna fall apart at any moment.”

Rylee glanced down at her silver ankh. It wasn’t the most fabulous piece of construction in the world, but it didn’t seem that bad… unless it was because it was made from a time 547 years before. Which was ridiculous of course. “Yeah, right. Why are you guys talking like we’re in _Halo_?”

“ _Halo_?” The girl looked completely confused. “What does that mean? Is it off-planet slang?”

“No, seriously,” Rylee said forcefully. “What the frak is going on here?”

The guy with the chameleon earrings looked at Rylee with a concerned expression. “Are you okay? Do you want me to flag an ambulance?” He held up what Rylee supposed was a mobile phone, which looked like a cross between an iPhone and a Game Boy Advance.

Rylee closed her eyes. This was all so weird. First, the messed up Halo game, now it was like she was in _Halo_ …

_Wait…_ Was it possible? She recalled the bizarre warping of the TV, then the blackout, and now this weird “future” place.

“No…” She opened her eyes and shook her head. “Sorry… Just hit my head earlier and I… What’s today’s date?”

The two people shared a quick look between them.

“Uh, October 17th, 2552,” the girl said.

Rylee’s thoughts raced. That was only three days before the Covenant invasion of Earth began. That meant she had three days to prepare before the whole planet went to hell.

She knew she had to act fast, but to do what? She could try to warn people, but who would listen to the crazy chick who thinks she’s from 2009 in an alternate universe where all this was fictional? Well, she supposed he could prove it through her knowledge of the Haloverse. However, that offered still more trouble.

He doubted ONI would take too kindly to someone knowing their secrets. Knowing them, they might consider her a spy or at least too great a liability to let go…

_Hey, that’s what he meant by ‘oni’,_ Rylee thought briefly. _He thought the blackout was ONI’s doing…_

And then it came to her.

_Of course,_ she thought. It was the Forerunner artifact from _ilovebees_ that caused the blackout. That could explain how she arrived in the first place. If that artifact, which she knew intimately enough to write its article on Halopedia, was powerful enough to take Nassau Station to 2004 in the _Dead or Alive_ universe, it could potentially have drawn her from 2009 in her universe. _Yep, this is officially insane._

But if this was a world in which _ilovebees_ was not only canon but _real_ , that could potentially offer her a source of security. She knew about vigilante groups that could perhaps stand a chance against the Covenant enough to change some things for the better. Who better than a _Halo_ geek to navigate the Haloverse?

“Thanks,” she said. “Yes, thank you. I, uh, I am a refugee… I got here from Coral shortly before it was glassed. Listen, I have family in New Jersey, but I find myself a bit short on credits at the moment. Could either of you please get me a train ticket there? I hate to beg, but I have little in the way of money at the moment.”

“You’re off the grid, aren’t you?” the guy asked, looking at Rylee oddly.

“I… Yes,” he admitted. She knew there could be trouble at this point. Being off the grid usually meant you weren’t legally on Earth.

“I’m so sorry about Coral,” the girl interjected.

“Thanks,” Rylee said, trying to look reasonably dejected, like her homeworld really had been destroyed.

“I can’t get you on a train if you don’t have a chattersig,” the guy said, shaking his head.

“But here,” he said, pulling up a holographic map of the city on his iPhone-like chatter, “There’s a packbus pick-up point here. They should be able to get you where you need to go. Might take a few days to get there, though.”

Rylee swallowed. In a few days the Covenant would invade…

“Thanks,” she said anyway. “That’s really helpful.”

She studied the map, trying to memorize it. Seattle had changed so much in 500 years…


	2. Chapter 2

**PACKBUS, WASHINGTON, EARTH, OCTOBER 17 TH, 2552 (MILITARY CALENDAR)**

Rylee squirmed around, trying to get comfortable on the packbus seat. Though she lacked any form of recognizable currency, the driver had let her on in exchange for one of her rings, in the form of a silver dragon clutching a red stone. Apparently, the guy had never seen anything quite like it, making it valuable enough to earn her passage to where she needed to go.

The trip wasn’t superb, but it at least included free food. Rylee knew from her research on Halopedia that packbuses always kept a few passengers on the grid so that the Civilian Administration Authority didn’t guess something was up. These legal citizens kindly provided food and drink for the rest of the bus.

However, as Rylee had feared, the food wasn’t quite up to par with what she was used to. The war with the Covenant had cost the UNSC much of their food supply, and there were all sorts of rationings of various ingredients. And so, she mainly just warmed himself with hot tea as she tried to figure out her situation.

“There’s more than one universe out there,” she noted, tapping her chin. “That is known fact. Qubit.org and the quantum computer projects are basing everything on that concept.”

The particles’ reaction to counterparts in other universes provided the means for a transuniversal computer to be developed. “But universes so different?”

Normal theory suggested that alternate universes differed only by a few molecules. Enough, perhaps, to create an entirely separate timeline of events, true. She recalled reading a _Back to the Future_ fanfic in which one life saved had led to nuclear apocalypse via the Ripple Effect, which held that the smallest changes could provoke vast consequences. But that still didn’t explain how a whole world could be represented as a work of fiction in another.

She tried thinking about it for a bit but then shook her head. She wasn’t a scientist. It didn’t matter so much how it happened but that it did happen. For that, she had two questions: 1) Can it be reversed? 2) Was it an isolated incident?

While she loved the Haloverse as an observer, it was a really dangerous place to actually live in. She loved her home far more and would want to terminate this vacation at some point. It could be like she was on the end of a rubber band stretching out the longer she was in the Haloverse, and it would eventually snap back and send her home, like in that _Animorphs_ book. On the other hand, going back could involve activating the Forerunner artifact again. That would be really, really hard to accomplish, given that it was in the basement of Chawla Base, not to mention that it was implied to have the function of activating the Halo Array.

And it was entirely possible that lightning had struck once in sending her here, but it was also possible that it had also happened to other individuals. If so, it was important that she be able to find them and communicate with them. For one thing, they were all in the same boat and should stick together. For another, the arrival of people from a universe where _Halo_ was fiction could seriously shake up the Haloverse. If someone as obsessed with _Halo_ as Rylee was were to end up in the hands of the Covenant, say, or even the United Rebel Front? Well, that could have terrifying consequences.

Rylee took another sip of tea. There had to be some way to get the word out to other universe travelers, if they did indeed exist. What she needed was a way to communicate that she knew about the game without ONI wondering how she knew something so secret. She started thinking about maybe the Iris symbol, a Forerunner glyph thought to mean the number 0, but dismissed that idea. Civilians weren’t supposed to know Forerunner symbols…

However… There was the one instance of the Society of the Ancients. Those guys, general alien wackos of the 2007 era, had come to the conclusion that aliens, which they called “Ancients”, had visited the Earth in the distant past and had inspired humanity’s technology. Though Rylee doubted most of their examples (Stonehenge, the Antikythera mechanism, etc.) were legitimate examples of alien visitation, they had succeeded in noting a Tasmanian petroglyph that depicted the Iris symbol. She wondered if the organization was still around. If it was, then perhaps she could use it to get the word out to other visitors from her universe.

She considered also using it to send a warning of the approaching alien invasion. If she disguised her knowledge as, say, a psychic prediction, then perhaps she could influence enough people while staying under ONI’s radar. She’d seen enough science fiction movies to be wary of the government, especially one that had okayed the SPARTAN-II program. He wondered if SOTA was the right sort of “wacko” movement to broadcast a psychic. If it even still existed in any kind of form after 544 years.

Whatever the case, she would have to figure it out later. She sipped her tea and tried to make herself comfortable for the long wait ahead of her.


	3. Chapter 3

**ENDERLIN, NORTH DAKOTA, U.S.A., EARTH, OCTOBER 18 TH, 2552 (MILITARY CALENDAR)**

After spending the entirety of the day in transit, Rylee took the initiative to leave the bus while it was stopped in a city in eastern North Dakota, which was about halfway to her destination. According to her watch… Well, technically her watch said it was 2009 but, anyway, she could tell that it had been at least seventeen hours since she left Seattle. It was time to stretch her legs… make some preparations.

She had asked to use the bus driver’s chatter to do a little Internet research. The bus driver had seemed a little bemused at her use of the word ‘Internet’ – Rylee supposed it was akin to a 2009er using the term ‘motorcar’ – but had allowed it, just so long as she didn’t do anything illegal with it. She had assured him she would not and commenced to figuring out the device.

“Where did you say you were from?” the driver asked after a few minutes of Rylee’s less-than-successful attempts to use the chatter.

“Coral,” she answered, trying to see if the chatter responded to tilting (it did).

“ _Yeah_ …” the driver drawled. “You don’t look like you’re from Coral.”

“Fine,” Rylee admitted, annoyed. It shouldn’t matter in an _illegal_ transport service if her story was accurate. “I’m from Tribute, then. Harmony. Troy. What does it matter?”

The driver raised his eyebrows and spread his arms. “I guess it doesn’t…” He watched Rylee with a curious expression.

 _Ah, yes!_ Rylee thought as she successfully opened what looked like a web search application. _Now for the keys…_ She managed to type out a search for “society of the ancients”.

A little ‘busy’ icon appeared, similar in style to manga, as the search went. After a few seconds, the results came back. Rylee frowned in disappointment.

There was nothing to do with the UFO nuthouse Society of the Ancients. Instead, she got selected text from articles on political theory and sociology. It seemed that SOTA had been consumed by the depths of time.

Rylee sighed. She decided to look for something along the same lines. She did another search for “Tasmanian petroglyph” and included the tag “xenoarchaeology”. This time, she _did_ get what she wanted.

“Research Center for the Study of Prehistoric Alien Visitation,” she read aloud. The organization seemed legitimate… or as legitimate as these characters tended to be, anyway. The site did have the picture of the Tasmanian petroglyph depicting the Iris symbol. Looked like SOTA wasn’t the last alien-nut group to take interest in the etching.

Rylee saw a hyperlink to call them. _Might as well…_

Unsure what she intended to say, Rylee activated the call. Fortunately, the chatter still obviously functioned in the similar manner of holding a phone to one’s ear and mouth – otherwise she wasn’t sure what she would’ve done.

“Hello,” she said when the phone connected with an answering machine. “My name is…”

She hesitated, wondering whether or not to use her real name. “…Jo Staten. I thought I might offer you some information that might be of interest. Um, that petroglyph that you have posted on your domain… I know for a fact that it represents a numerical value used by a race of aliens known as Forerunner, who coexisted with humanity some hundred thousand years ago. I also know that the Covenant have a high interest in the Forerunner… one built into their society and culture. I can present the evidence to support this claim, but I would like a… a favor in return.

“I represent a group of individuals known as the Halo Fans. I would like to let all of my fellow Halo Fans know that they should converge in New Jersey to meet a man named Kamal Zaman. If you could arrange a wide-spread availability of messages to appear in public channels, I could be persuaded to reveal valuable information regarding the Forerunner.”

Rylee started to terminate the call but then reconsidered.

“Oh,” she added, “if my calculations are correct… the colossal EMP may well attract the Covenant. Very soon… within days… we could be looking at an invasion of planet Earth.” She disconnected.

“You know,” the driver said, “If you wanted an ad campaign, there are services specifically tailored for that kind of thing.”

“Maybe so,” Rylee said, “but I don’t have an identity on Earth. Hard to pay someone when you’re off the grid. Thanks for letting me use this.” She handed the chatter back to the driver.

“No problem…” The driver accepted it, giving Rylee a really weird look. “If I didn’t know better, I might think _you_ were an alien.”

Rylee chuckled. In a sense, she was.

“Maybe I am,” she joked. “Maybe I’m the Prophet of Truth, leader of the Covenant…”

The guy snorted. “Yeah, a ‘prophet.’”

Rylee headed back onto the bus. She wasn’t surprised the driver hadn’t understood her reference. After all, the Prophets were largely unknown at this time. _In a few weeks, the Prophet of Truth will enter the public eye… and that guy will be really, really unnerved by me,_ she thought in satisfaction, preparing herself for another long wait.


End file.
